EdibleTorah D’var Torah on PunkTorah

The great folks over on PunkTorah asked me to offer some Passover ideas. You can read all about it there.

Here’s a taste, if you are curious:

In the movie “The Princess Bride”, the heroine Buttercup negotiates what she believes is safety for her true love Wesley before she is whisked off as a prisoner. As she rides away, Wesley looks at his captors (who have no intention of honoring the bargain) with a calm that contradicts his situation and says “We are men of action, lies do not become us”. Whereupon they knock him senseless and drag him to his death. (For those who haven’t seen the movie: Don’t worry, eventually he gets better).

In his essay “No, Everything Is Not Going to Be OK”, author Seth Godin eschewes the trite (and often empty) offer of hope that people seek. We are told by everyone from parents to spouses to managers to people at the other end of the bar that “it’s going to be OK”, when it is obvious that they barely understand our situation; when it is clear to us that it really WON’T be OK. But we choose to accept and believe their words because sometimes we want reassurance more than we want honesty or clarity.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that sometimes – maybe a lot of times – it WILL be OK. Our moment of panic is just that, and once the stress has passed things really will return to the way they were before.

But, Seth posits, when people need to create, or innovate, or adapt – in those situations, honestly it’s not going to be OK.

It’s going to be different. Some things MIGHT be better, but there’s a good chance that at least some things won’t be better, that some things won’t be the same and that some things could get worse. In fact, when we introduce change, there’s a chance that everything will get worse, at least for a while.

Standing at the edge of the sea – with the vast expanse of water in front of them and the might of the Egyptian army bearing down on them from behind, the Israelites may have realized this.